


Outplayed

by anticyclone



Category: The Luminous Dead - Caitlin Starling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Injuries, Cave Horror, Eventual escape, Gen, Hand injury, Minor Character Death, Tunnelers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26572186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/pseuds/anticyclone
Summary: I DON'T THINK IT SAW YOU, says the silent message Em sends Gyre in Camp Four. But Em is wrong. And Gyre was right - she's not crazy. She's never been alone. If not this thing chasing her, then the cave.The cave kept Eli. It didn't keep him well. It wants to keep Gyre, too.
Relationships: Em Arasgain & Gyre Price, Gyre Price & The Cave
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Fic In A Box





	Outplayed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



> I uploaded [a screenshot of the cave map](https://i.imgur.com/KgIus74.png) for reference.
> 
> Thank you to Morbane for betaing. All mistakes are my own.

"Wait."

Gyre lurched back a step. Her boot fell on the edge of random cave debris, hard and fragile chips of stone. Keyboard clacking told her that Em was busy typing. Gyre scanned the area immediately in front of her, searching for movement, but discovered nothing. It was just Camp Four. She was halfway to the surface. Nearly home.

Em must be adjusting her suit. Some tiny, fiddly setting buried deep down.

As she shifted her weight Gyre's blistered calf flared like scalding water splashing against her skin. She flinched and put all her weight onto her good leg. Maybe Em had told her to wait because Gyre was still injured, hadn't slept long enough for whatever reparative process Em had started to finish. Maybe there was some way to speed it up, and that was what Em was doing for her.

But Em gave no more commands. She didn't release Gyre from her hold. The noise of her furious typing faltered. Gyre drew in a whisper of a breath to the sound of Em's fingers hesitating on her keyboard.

When Gyre exhaled, Em drew in a breath of her own. But she didn't use it to speak.

Words flared over Gyre's HUD. Bold and glowing. Impossible to ignore, suction-current-warning yellow.

DON'T SCREAM.

Gyre hadn't been planning on it, but the injunction made her throat swell. Her hands, loose at her sides, locked up. She tensed, ready to bolt.

Em's fingertips ghosted over her keys, as if she were afraid the sound might travel. Might give Gyre away. Away to what? A Tunneler— But, no, Gyre heard nothing, felt nothing, so Em couldn't have detected a Tunneler's approach. So then what—

DON'T LOOK UP. DON'T RAISE YOUR HEAD. LOOK NATURAL.

Obedience meant fighting her fear-gripped muscles, but Gyre managed. Nothing under her feet but chips of rock and her own footprints. There were old ones, too, further into Camp Four, left by others before they'd escaped or died on this mission. Cavers were supposed to leave nothing behind, but some things were impossible to erase.

Em wouldn't be telling her to hold still if it was a Tunneler. A Tunneler wouldn't care if Gyre was relaxed or not - It would come for her no matter what. It had to be something else. Gyre saw nothing, just those old footprints. But Em had all the computers. She could replay footage, zoom in, analyze. Gyre's throat tightened. Her eyes focused but the readout on her HUD highlighted nothing. It couldn't be a Tunneler. What did Em see?

Had she seen Isolde?

Gyre's head jerked up. The suit flared into action around her. It locked in place, so her chin rose only a few centimeters. The abrupt hold vibrated through Gyre's jaw.

DON'T LOOK UP. DON'T SPEAK. I'M MODIFYING THE VOICE CHANNEL WE'RE USING TO COMMUNICATE.

Gyre parted her lips and whispered, barely feeling her cheeks move, "Em? What is it?"

If she'd seen Isolde, surely she would say.

YOU NEED TO TURN AROUND.

If Em had seen Isolde, surely she wouldn't turn Gyre around. Surely she would fling Gyre forward.

TURN AROUND, GYRE.

For a split second Gyre hesitated. The order floated bright and yellow before her eyes.

Then Em's fingers hit her keyboard and the suit moved for Gyre. The knees tensed and the heel spun, so Gyre faced the way she had come. The suit propelled her forward, deeper into the cave, step by sure step.

"Em, what is _happening?"_

"You left something back there."

**DON'T. SPEAK.** I SAW SOMETHING.

Gyre made a sound in the back of her throat. She threw her muscles against the next step but it did nothing. Her bad leg protested.

I DON'T THINK IT SAW YOU.

Gyre mouthed, "Em," without any noise to it.

Something crunched in the debris behind Gyre.

Em whirled the suit around, fists up, to face it. The cave blurred for half a second as the computer compensated and shifted Gyre's readout display.

The reconstructed view landed on a figure.

A suit.

Another caver. Lurching toward her.

RUN.

"Isolde?"

The cave had kept her. The cave had really kept her. Her suit was shattered in several spots and creaked as she took shuddering, halting steps toward Gyre, but the cave had kept Isolde all this time. Now Isolde was coming for Gyre.

The voice line died. The indicator turned solid amber. It stayed that way for a heartbeat, and then it came back to life. Em must have completed whatever changes she was making to the channel — Of course she'd been trying to change the channel. Of course. Whoever was in the other suit might be able to overhear them, otherwise.

"That isn't my mother!" Em slammed her fists against her desk so hard the noise rattled Gyre's skull.

"But…"

The other person stretched out one hand.

Gyre's HUD spit out flags all along the other suit. It was from Em's company, so of course the suits were trying to communicate. It was vanishingly rare to have two cavers on a single job, but you would want them to be able to identify problems with each other without having to manually examine the suits. _Warning,_ helmet integrity compromised. _Warning,_ knee joint out of alignment. _Warning,_ battery level critical. _Warning,_ immediate medical attention required.

The hand of the other suit had been crushed. It must have happened recently, because the flesh exposed by cracked polymer plating was slick and wet even to Gyre's reconstructed view. The cave had kept this spectre, but it hadn't kept it well.

"Caver!" Em snapped. "Run!"

Gyre's legs moved before she understood she'd barked "Base!" back in acknowledgment.

Em had been wrong. There had been someone here all along.

"It was never the spores," Gyre panted as she ran. Chips of stone crumbled beneath her boots. "It was never the spores. I knew someone was here. I knew I wasn't crazy."

"Great," Em said. "You're not crazy. There's just someone chasing you. Run faster, caver."

Gyre headed back the way she had come, to the mouth of the Long Drop. Where she'd cut the rope.

Where she'd _cut the rope._

Hadn't she?

"Where am I going?" she asked, scrambling around scattered breakdown, those loose chunks of rock that dropped from cave ceilings and became obstacle courses on the ground. "I can't go back to the Long Drop. It could drop down on top of me. It could cut my rope."

She'd cut the rope. Gyre had absolutely cut the rope. She had seen — She had seen a face, she'd felt how tight the rope was. She remembered the line slithering through the clip, away from the unknown, unsafe anchor bolt. Whatever had been holding the rope taut couldn't have survived that. Nobody could survive that. Nothing. Not even in a suit.

"Don't go to the Long Drop," Em agreed.

Gyre kicked a rock out of her way. She heard clumsy, uneven footsteps following in her wake. Residual spores from Camp Five sparkled on her boots.

A map appeared in the HUD.

"You're going to have to climb up. There's a dead end jutting off from this cavern."

"You want to send me down a dead end?"

"Not really," Em said, which was not reassuring. A breath whistled through Em's teeth. "I don't think it can climb. It looks too messed up."

"It got here before me! I saw someone come up the Long Drop behind me, but it got here first!" Gyre protested, before changing track anyway.

More typing noises heralded the appearance of new marker flags in her HUD vision: Em plotting a course away from the shambling thing trailing in Gyre's wake.

Gyre's hand wrapped around a thin column of stone. There would be no time to drill bolts or even tie a rope into place. The wall in front of her sloped slightly. She'd have to free climb it. The rockface was rough and marked with gaps and bulges of stone, which meant handholds. A couple of meters up, her knee bumped into a dip in the rock. The impact rolled through her suit and her blistered calf. One of her hands slipped.

"I thought it was empty when I first saw it," Em said. "But that wouldn't make any sense."

Gyre realized that when Em said _it,_ Em meant the suit, and when Gyre said _it,_ Gyre meant whatever force was propelling the thing inside the suit to hunt her.

Gyre latched onto another handhold. She forced herself to put all her weight on her blistered leg and push up. It made her teeth gnash but there was no help for it. Inch by terrible inch, she crawled up the cave wall toward the dead end. The map told her the opening at the top of this climb would immediately dip straight down on the other side, an upside-down U.

It was like jumping into a well to hide from a wolf.

The other caver.

Maybe it wasn't Isolde after all — Isolde would be showing Gyre her face, Gyre felt that down in her bones — but then, who was it? Em had sworn that no one else knew about this cave, that her contacts in the mining industry wouldn't have sent someone down here. And Gyre had found… Gyre had already found everyone else…

"Em," she panted. She had to twist herself around an outcrop of stone. It made pain spike through her abdomen, where the cannula of the feeding tube split her skin. "Em, who didn't you tell me about?"

Silence.

"Who didn't you tell me about?" Gyre repeated. She put her knee down on a ledge. It let her breathe in and look down.

Looking down was a mistake.

The other caver. The thing. The suit. It was dragging itself along behind her. One of its legs moved mechanically, the one that Gyre's HUD had flagged with the broken knee. The warning about battery levels shook in Gyre's vision. If the thing inside the suit — If the person Em hadn't told her about was using the suit to compensate for a dislocated knee, then whatever battery they had left would be burned up in no time. All she'd need to do was outlast it. The suit would freeze up and die, and the other caver with it.

"I told you about everyone," Em said. "Keep climbing."

Gyre was starting to get the feeling the person with the crushed hand wouldn't be able to climb up after her, but the command in Em's voice spurred her onward.

"I found everyone," Gyre said. "If you told me about everyone, then there's no one I didn't find. Who _is_ this, Em?"

"Eli Abramsson."

"You lost him in the sump," Gyre said. Her hand almost slipped again. She groaned and fumbled for purchase. Em did something to the suit to make the hands take over some for Gyre on the next several meters of the climb. It helped. Her calf still throbbed, but at least she didn't have to worry about slipping. "You lost him in the sump, and I never found him."

"Maybe… Maybe I just lost the connection," Em said. Her voice shook. "Maybe he climbed up. The ruined cache you found, with the missing batteries. If he kept the suit in low power mode, he might have lasted all this time."

"But why not leave? If he knew the way out, why not leave?" Gyre asked. But she knew the answer.

The cave. It had kept the others. It had kept Isolde.

It'd kept Eli, but it hadn't kept him well.

Gyre landed hard at the top of the wall. She slumped over. There was enough of a flat surface to lie down and nothing more. Immediately on the other side, the cave dropped away again. Just like the map said. The HUD told her the dead end was a hundred meters deep before it bottomed out. No water to tread through, but no way out except up if she did catapult herself down there. If she fell, would she break her knee? Crush her hand?

"Em, I cut the rope," she said. "I cut the rope, when I was in the Long Drop. I felt someone hanging on it, and I cut it. But if Eli fell, there's no way he could've gotten to Camp Four before me."

Em's face appeared in the HUD. She chewed on her bottom lip. "Gyre, I'm playing the footage now. The rope is slack."

"No."

The Long Drop replaced Em's face. There was the anchor, highlighted as unknown. There was Gyre's hand. There was the knife. The rope.

The rope was slack.

"No," Gyre said again. "No. I know it was tight. I could feel someone at the other end. I know it."

"Gyre," Em said. "There was no one there."

Gyre forced herself to sit up. She leaned over the cave wall, in the direction she had come. There was so much breakdown littering the floor that it took her a second to spot Eli. He lurched from one pile of stone to another. His crushed hand grabbed a pillar for support and left a wet smear behind. The suit bent almost double at the waist. He didn't look up, even when Gyre moved and knocked a pebble off the shelf and to the ground below.

If he hadn't been hanging on the rope, then what had she seen? What had she imagined? There had been a face. She had seen a face. The urge to cut the rope had been real, and it had come from somewhere. Gyre was sure she'd seen a face, and the video said she hadn't.

But Em saw him now. Eli wasn't a collection of spores rattling around Gyre's brain. He was real.

If he was real, then he must have climbed to Camp Four. He couldn't have been there the whole time. Which meant he had climbed the Long Drop _before_ Gyre.

The rope. The cave had shown Gyre the rope, like it had been before Gyre got there. The cave had wanted Gyre to know that someone else climbed the Long Drop first. She'd thought it'd been happening right then, but the cave had been showing her the past. Showing Gyre what she was about to run into, not what she'd actually been experiencing.

It didn't feel like it had been meant as a warning. It hadn't kept Gyre safe. It felt like…

It felt like the vision had been a promise.

Eli dragged himself toward her, and it felt like the cave delivering on a vow.

On the screen, her hand had sliced through the rope. It fell away. "Turn off the replay," Gyre said, and the video vanished.

Eli sagged against the bottom of the cave wall. His non-crushed hand reached up, but he couldn't lift himself. He was too damaged and the suit battery too low. Gyre was safe.

The thought bubbled up at the back of her mind and popped in the same second. Gyre gasped. The air hitched in her lungs, and she started to laugh.

"What's happening?" Em asked.

"I'm safe," Gyre said. If she could touch her own skin, she would have buried her face in her hands.

"For the moment." Em's hands moved over her keyboard.

Gyre had no idea what she was doing, and didn't ask. If it was important Em would say so. As soon as that thought crossed her mind, though, Gyre started laughing even harder. Em only told her things to move her forward or back. She only gave up information when Gyre left her no choice. Even after all this time. Em kept moving Gyre around, like a player token on a game board.

Right now Em wanted Gyre aboveground as much as Gyre wanted to be aboveground. But here Gyre was instead, half collapsed and halfway into a dead end.

Em had been outplayed.

There was no way to touch her own skin, but Gyre could still wrap her arms around herself. She did. She couldn't feel it but it helped prop her upright. On the cave floor, Eli had sunk down onto his knees. He'd leaned all his weight forward onto one hand, the one that wasn't crushed.

The cave had kept him. It had kept Eli going all these long weeks. He must have lost connection with Em. If Gyre had lost connection on accident, if it'd been swept away in the sump, would she have believed in a malfunction? Or would she have thought Em had abandoned her? If Eli had gotten as paranoid as Gyre had, of course he wouldn't have tried to talk to Em. He would've robbed the caches to keep himself alive and stayed radio silent. Instead of going out, he'd gone back to Camp Five. The way Gyre almost had.

She shuddered. Laughter died in her lungs. She touched her tongue to her lips just to feel her own flesh.

The cave had kept Eli. Even if he'd tried to leave at some point, it had pulled him back in. It certainly hadn't let him get past Camp Four. Maybe he'd found Jennie, like she had, except now Jennie was ripped open and decaying in the cave air. If Gyre had found Jennie like that there would've been no way for Em to talk her down. It had been bad enough to find the other caver closed up in her coffin of a suit.

But Eli didn't know what had happened to Jennie. All he knew was that when he'd returned to Camp Four, Jennie's suit had been torn apart. Like she'd been scavenged. Eli must think Gyre was here on Em's behalf.

Of course, Gyre _was_ here on Em's behalf, and Gyre _had_ desecrated Jennie's suit to scavenge it for parts. How much had Eli heard over the standard channel? How easy would it have been for him to pick up Gyre's communications without her knowing? She'd felt watched for so long, it was impossible to guess when Eli may have realized he was no longer alone in the cave.

"We've been outplayed, Em. You've been outplayed." Gyre groaned. "It's winning. There's no way out."

"You're not making any sense."

"The cave," Gyre said. Her voice sounded far away. "It kept Eli in reserve. Now it's used him to corner me."

She looked at Eli again. He'd leaned back. He was messing with his suit, picking at the polymer plating around his crushed hand. It looked like he was worrying at a scab. Gyre's hand throbbed in sympathy, at least until the blister on her leg throbbed and drowned it out.

"You're not making any sense," Em said. Hadn't she already said that?

Running out of moves to make.

A loud pop echoed up from the cave floor. Eli had broken something in his suit. Broken something that hadn't already been broken, anyway. The warning flags highlighting all the damage disappeared. Only the warning about medical attention remained. Even the battery level flag went away.

Eli moved, and a piece of cracked polymer plating fell away from his crushed hand. It clattered down to the rock. A tiny puff of dust floated up around it. Piece by cracked piece, peeling the world's worst stubborn eggshell, Eli freed his crushed hand from his suit. Her HUD showed Gyre the entire thing in gory detail. The close-up of his hand made her gag. Her stomach roiled. The wound around her feeding tube ached.

"Gyre, talk to me."

"What is he doing?" Gyre whispered.

"If his suit is at less than five percent," Em said, "then he might be trying to get out of it. He knows he can't get to another battery. And you know what happens if the suit dies."

Gyre hugged herself tighter. She wanted to turn off the reconstruction, but that would leave her in absolute darkness. There was no convenient glowing fungus in this cave. Without her reconstruction she couldn't see at all, and the headlamp gave off heat and might call a Tunneler. If there had been anything to watch other than Eli, anything at all, maybe she could have looked away. But Eli was it.

Eli's fingers fumbled as he continued removing the suit pieces encasing his arm. More polymer plating fell. It was starting to stack up on itself. Underneath the suit, Eli's skin had gone pruny. There were welts all up and down his arm, especially around his elbow. Blisters, like the one on Gyre's calf.

"He's why the Tunneler came. He's been walking around the cave, injured, and making noise," Em said. Her voice had gotten scratchy. She faltered. "Gyre. Gyre, he's why the Tunneler came."

Eli couldn't get the plate over his collarbone to open up. It was too wedged into place or too securely connected with the pieces around it. There was a dent on one side. When whatever had crushed Eli's hand had happened, it must have also damaged other parts of the plating. Eli tried but couldn't open up the chest of the suit. He even reached up with what was left of his damaged hand to try. It didn't work.

"Gyre," Em said. "He's why the Tunneler came."

She'd already said that.

"You already said that," Gyre murmured. She leaned forward to get a better look at Eli and started to tip over the edge of the platform.

Em hissed and the suit locked up around Gyre. The arms came down and her hands dug straight into the rock, the fingers making holes in the stone. Gyre leaned back on her own, though. The suit held her in place but she raised her own head. She'd just wanted a better look. Eli was hard to see. It didn't make sense, what he was doing. If his battery died he wouldn't last very long. Not if most of his torso was still encased. He had to know that. What was left of him had to know that.

The cave wouldn't need to use Eli to beat Gyre if Gyre fell to her death all on her own.

Suddenly, Em let out a tangled whine. Her face took over the HUD, but Gyre swept it away, so it shrank to a couple of inches in the corner of her vision. Em was chewing on her lip again. "Gyre, you're going to have to run past him. You have to climb back down. You can't stay there."

"You made me climb up here," Gyre said. Her voice broke at the end.

She was so tired. She wanted to feel real again. The only feeling she was getting from her body was pain, the burning ache in her side and the screaming blister, which felt like it was spreading along her calf, not getting better. It hurt so bad she couldn't even be hungry. If she thought about that, she thought about the feeding tube, and nausea swept over her.

"Gyre, Eli is why the Tunneler came," Em said. This time Gyre knew she'd already said it. At least once, if not twice. But then Em explained, "He's taking off his suit. He's going to bring the Tunneler back."

Gyre's gut lurched. It hurt.

 _Whack._ Eli's hands covered his face. He started beating at his head with his palms. It felt like the ledge tilted under Gyre's legs, like she was going to be sick. Eli kept beating at his head. _Whack. Whack._ His helmet had wet smears all over it. **_Whack._** Then his fingers curled in, around his faceplate, and his arms twisted. His crushed hand fell away from his face, but his good one kept going, the fingers digging into his helmet. A metallic cracking sound covered up the noise of Gyre gagging again. She wanted to vomit.

"You have to beat him to the sump. With his suit coming apart, he can't follow you into Camp Three."

Eli's face plate fell away. He threw it to the ground, and it skid along like a stone tossed onto a lake. (Or so Gyre had seen once, in a movie. She wouldn't know.) His chin lifted.

It was impossible. Without the HUD, without a headlamp, there was no way for Eli to see her in the dark. But he was looking straight at her.

The reconstruction made his face as vivid as any of the recordings Gyre had been watching. Eli had a strong jaw shadowed with a thin beard. His lips were chapped, cracked and red, like something had gone wrong with his suit. Something _else,_ besides everything that had obviously gone wrong with his suit.

But Gyre couldn't think about that. Em said, "Oh my god," and Gyre's head spun.

It was impossible in the dark, but Eli stared straight at her. There was something very, very wrong with his eyes. In the reconstruction, they gleamed.

"I need the headlamp," Gyre heard herself saying.

"No!"

"I need the headlamp," Gyre heard herself repeating. The suit still had her hands buried in stone. The hold was secure enough that she could lean forward and not tip over the edge. "I have to be sure. Please, Em. I have to be sure of what I'm seeing for once."

"And then you run?"

"And then I run," Gyre confirmed. As fast as her blistered leg would allow.

The reconstruction shut off. For half a moment Gyre was blind. Then her headlamp lit up the cavern.

Eli flinched. His teeth gnashed his lips, and when he raised his head, the glare he shot her glowed. Tiny specks of light floated across his eyes. The light gathered in his pupils and dispersed when he shuddered, but a faint glow remained. Gyre stared in horrified silence. Tiny specks of light. Like the luminescent spores that had dusted her suit when she'd stomped across the fleshy fungal growths at Camp Five. There were still residual glowing specks clinging to her boots now. Eli's eyes glowed like the _spores._

Eli opened his mouth and screamed.

A fine, glowing mist spilled over his ragged lips and coated his chin. It clung to the chest of his suit and some of it drifted on the air, spun around by the force of Eli's howling.

"Fuck," Em whispered. "Fuck!"

Gyre flashed cold. It was a good thing the suit was locked into place, because her whole body went slack. It felt so far away. For a moment her abdomen didn't hurt, and neither did her leg. It was all just so far away.

Gyre had been stupid enough to cycle the spores through her suit, and only having Em fix it had saved her. What if she hadn't had Em? What if she'd been alone, no contact with the surface, no idea if she was ever going to make it back up the Long Drop? She'd been desperate to refresh the water in her suit when she'd gotten to that sump. Eli would have been in the cave for so much longer at that point. He would've nearly died already. Maybe broken his knee too. He would have done the same thing Gyre had — If he'd come up through the sump and done it before climbing out, he wouldn't have seen the fungal growths at all. Em had said they weren't there when Eli went through Camp Five the first time.

This was what the cave had wanted to do to her. Except Gyre had Em. Gyre had Em to fix it. Eli had been all alone.

This was it. This was how the cave had kept him.

"I have to run," Gyre said.

The cave was a whole world. Gyre could stay here forever. She knew that. The cave would keep her alive, and send her through sumps, and nudge her down tunnels and up waterfalls and through empty Tunneler paths. It would keep her, and love her, and play with her. Until Em sent someone else down. For Gyre this time, instead of Isolde.

And then Gyre would be Eli. The cave would try to outplay Em again. It would move Gyre around to box in whoever Em sent to save her.

"Em. I have to run. The cave wants to keep me, like it kept him."

It would eat her from the inside.

Em didn't comment on that. Instead she started typing. The headlamp shut off. The reconstruction replaced it. Em had done something to enhance it, make the spores more visible. They glowed warning-marker yellow.

Em said, "Ready on three."

Eli's howling stuttered. He sobbed once and doubled over, pounding his crushed fist against the ground, even though it made him scream with every impact. Glowing spores formed a thin puddle underneath his face.

"One," Em said.

 _Whack._ Drops of Eli's blood mixed with the spores. They grew dark.

"Two," Em said.

 _Whack._ When Eli raised his wrist, not all of his hand came with it. The spot he'd been punching was a wet mess of darkened spores and blood and pieces of Eli, pieces that couldn't be held together anymore, not without the polymer plating of his suit holding him fast.

"Three!"

Gyre's suit let go of the stone.

She levered herself over the edge, found a ledge to rest her good foot on, and turned herself around. The suit grabbed onto two handholds for her, and Gyre kicked so her good foot lodged in another hold in the rock. The next minute blurred. As soon as one of her hands found a new hold, the suit moved her feet for her. Or Gyre would push herself down and the suit would force her hand into stone to make sure she wouldn't fall.

By the bottom of the climb she was flushed and breathing hard, but it just meant she could spin around and start running without thinking about her leg too much.

"Do you want epinephrine?" Em asked.

"Not unless he grabs me."

A green path snaked across the cave floor: Em plotting a course out of Eli's reach. Gyre jumped over a small trench in the ground to follow it. Her footfalls made so much noise in the cavern. Gyre ignored it. When a pillar appeared in her path, she used it to yank herself forward. When the green line cut through a pile of breakdown, Gyre scrambled over it. It made her leg pulse. It made her wobble to the side.

When Eli staggered into the path, only a few meters ahead and moving far too fast for someone whose leg was dragging behind him, Gyre snatched a rock from the floor and threw it at him.

The cave still wanted him enough to fling him out of the way. Eli stumbled and fell heavily to one leg, but the rock sailed past him instead of directly into his unprotected face.

"Missing that helmet now, aren't you!" Gyre shouted. She bolted past him.

Em didn't point out that Eli couldn't hear Gyre anymore, not without the connection of their suits. Instead she said, "Gyre, something's coming."

"Fuck!"

There was nothing down here. The cave was everything. The cave had dead ends and drops and waterfalls and glowing, brain-colonizing fungus, and it had Tunnelers.

The cavern shook.

Gyre ran. Gyre ran, and Em put the count of remaining meters on the green path in her HUD. It didn't help. Her feet slammed into the cave floor, and she climbed up a slight incline, both her legs protesting now. The meter count seemed to only creep down.

"Duck!" Em ordered.

Gyre dropped down to her knees. She was moving too fast to duck her head. If she had, she would have slammed face first into the dirt. A rock whirled over her shoulder. It thudded into the ground. It was a sharp, fist-sized thing. The kind of rock you could throw with one hand.

Eli must have gotten up.

"How close is he?" Gyre asked. She clambered to her feet and kept running. The meter count fell, one by one.

"You don't want to know," Em told her.

The cavern shook again.

"How close is _it?"_

"You really don't want to know," Em said. But then she added, "It'll be here any second. Behind you and below."

Gyre managed three more meters before the ground erupted.

"Don't look," Em said, as Gyre twisted to look.

She had to look. She had to. The cave had sent the Tunneler for her. She had to know.

It was huge. Whatever Gyre had been picturing, it hadn't been this. This was — This was a worm. It was a worm that surged through rock the way Gyre swam through sumps. The stone didn't slow it down at all, although all the rock the Tunneler moved out of its way exploded around it. Only the fact that it'd burst into the cavern at the very opposite end kept Gyre (and Eli) from being crushed by flying debris.

The worm stretched up, and up, and up, impossibly long, impossibly huge, when would it _end—_

It stopped. Some of it was still hidden in the rock below. Half? More? It wavered in the air, and then collapsed onto the floor, so hard that the ground opened up underneath it. Part of its body was submerged in stone again, and it hadn't even finished coming into the cavern. It was so huge.

It rolled, turning to Gyre.

Eli was only ten meters away from her.

The Tunneler was only fifty meters away from him.

The worm body ended in a conical shape, but the Tunneler didn't have a face. Instead it had a plane of flesh covered in slit-like pits, each one individually opening and closing. Except there was nothing beneath the openings, just open paths into the Tunneler's body. It was — It was breathing. It was scenting, drawing in cave air, looking for targets. It rolled again, and Gyre realized the awful slits were all over its body. The whole creature was a tube of flesh covered in the things.

Eli hit the stump of his crushed hand against his head. There must have been a flicker of power left in his batteries, maybe because he'd destroyed his faceplate and shut off his reconstruction in the process, because his headlamp flared to life.

The Tuneller was coated in brilliantly colored scales. They flashed in the light of the headlamp, iridescent like oil. Like the sheen of the fungal spores coating Eli's eyes from the inside.

It breathed in. All the slits on its horrible face opened at once. The air in the cavern shifted.

The cave wanted her to see this.

It wanted Gyre to know how bad it could get when she fought.

"Fuck. You."

The Tunneler made a sound like an animal screeching, or a child crying. Eli screamed too, wordlessly. There was nothing left in the other caver anymore. When he raised his hands above his head, his crushed hand dripped blood and glowing spores. The fungus was in his blood now. He screamed, and the Tunneler howled.

_"Fuck. You."_

Gyre turned around. She found the green path still in her reconstructed vision and started running again.

This fucking cave didn't get to eat her.

The cavern shuddered. Huge slabs of rock broke off from the walls and ceiling. They smashed into the floor, which only made the shaking worse. The noise of it all was so much it hurt her ears even in the suit. Gyre narrowly avoided a boulder that fell in the middle of the green path. It was so wide she had to grab onto the edge and haul herself on top of it, because going around would waste time.

"Oh my god," Em said again.

Gyre knew that there were cameras on the back of her suit. Em could always have a 360 degree view of whatever Gyre was doing. But she didn't ask. She didn't want Em to show her, and Em would show her, if she demanded to be shown. There was the sound of more rock crunching, and a wet sound, and then the only noise was the Tunneler's screams. Gyre couldn't hear Eli's voice any longer. The next roar made her feel like she was running straight up through the waterfall. It felt like something in her would shatter.

"It's coming for me, isn't it?" Gyre asked. She knew she asked it. She couldn't hear herself asking.

Through the din, Em probably replied, "Keep running. You're almost there."

The meter count had dropped. Gyre could even see the glimmer of the sump at the end of the cavern. Her lungs heaved and her leg felt like it was being ripped open, but she tried to send the pain away. Nothing had ever been as beautiful as that sump.

The air shifted.

Gyre knew without looking and without asking to be shown that the Tunneler was right behind her. The roar wavered, the awful thing taking a breath.

"I'm sorry," Em said.

Gyre felt something pierce her shoulder. She stumbled, then leapt to her feet. In her chest her heart thrummed. For a brief second she careened from one side to another. The air around her shifted again, and the ground underneath her began to crack open. It had to be the weight of the Tunneler advancing on her. Gyre slid forward and started running by reflex, trying not to fall over onto her hands and knees. Her vision grew sharp and she didn't think it was the reconstruction. Her chest ached. Was she having a heart attack?

"Gyre, you are almost there."

"You — You injected me with epinephrine."

"I said I was sorry. Move! Move or you'll die!"

A gap opened in the ground. The Tunneler was falling into it, its weight dragging the cavern floor down with it. But Gyre was small. Gyre had legs. Gyre had one bad leg, but a whole load of epinephrine, and she was able to run along the side of the gap. She was able to keep moving, the meter count dropping below 20, below 15, below 10 — The sump was _right there._

The Tunneler lunged. The ground opened up. Gyre leapt.

Her feet hit the water. She plunged straight down, rolling in the water, and Em's hands echoed on the keyboard.

Gyre tumbled, stirring up clouds of silt. Her hands ended up in front of her. She had no idea which way she was facing, but Em did. Em made the suit kick. Em made the arms move. Em had her swim until her head stopped spinning, and then Gyre gasped, "Let me," and Em let go. Gyre kicked and kicked and clawed at the water, hauling herself forward.

She could feel the entire sump shaking with the confused rolling of the Tunneler behind her. She swam down until there wasn't any more _down_ left to go. Then she swam up.

The sump began to crumble. The water started to flow past her, sucked back through a new opening in the channel. Gyre grabbed onto an outcropping of rock and pushed herself forward against the sudden current.

Silt made the water opaque. But Gyre knew which way she faced and it didn't matter. She kept swimming up. She kicked in the water, and she used her hands to climb.

It was like running up a waterfall.

"Gyre," Em whispered, barely audible beyond the rush of water and shaking of stone. She shouldn't have been audible. Even piped into the helmet, Gyre shouldn't have been able to hear her. Maybe Gyre wasn't hearing anything at all, but Em's voice said, "Gyre, I need you."

Gyre broke the surface.

It was too soon.

She was still down in the sump, except the sump wasn't a sump anymore. All the water had drained away. There was nothing left to swim in. Gyre latched onto the wall, but not before sliding down a couple of meters.

She had climbed up the wall to the dead end and she could climb up to the top of this sump. The Tunneler wasn't going to get her.

Exposed to air, the sump was a twisted nightmare. Columns of stone jutted out at odd angles. There was no floor for Gyre to get purchase on. There were random patches of smooth rock face where years of water flow had beaten away all the roughness, and Gyre had to repeatedly hammer the wall to make a handhold for herself. And all the while the Tunneler grew closer. A crack beneath her made the cave groan. Gyre bit her tongue and scrambled forward. Her body wanted to run, and she couldn't. She wanted to look down, and she shouldn't.

The sump shook, and Gyre slipped. Her weight landed on her bad leg.

Em put a glow at the top of the reconstructed sump. The light at the end of the tunnel.

Gyre laughed. She pressed her head against stone, and laughed, and climbed. Another great crack rattled through her suit and her skull. Gyre ignored the throbbing in her bad leg - it was hard to feel it past the whole cave shaking with the Tunneler's approach - and climbed.

When she got close enough to the end of what had been the sump, Em made the glow disappear. Gyre hauled herself over the edge. Then she looked over her shoulder.

The Tunneler crawled along the path of the sump. The slits in its flesh breathed in and out. Its scales shone.

This piece of shit had killed Halian. It wanted to kill Gyre. It had killed Eli. Eli, who'd already been eaten alive by the cave. Eli, who couldn't do anything but hobble after Gyre, and hurt himself, and yell in pain. The Tunneler really hadn't liked that, had it?

The cave thought it'd outplayed them.

Gyre slammed the control that would retract her face plate. She wedged her fingers into the edge of her open helmet to keep the plate from slamming back into place.

Em screamed, "No!", and Gyre just plain screamed.

Every slit in the Tunneler's flesh slammed shut. It convulsed. It thrashed inside the tiny confines of the empty sump. And without the water to support it… It was too heavy to stay upright. It had crashed through the sump and caused all the water to drain away. It had nearly caught Gyre. But now it was destroying itself.

Gyre scooped up a rock at her feet. It was too big to hold in one hand, and her fingers fumbled. Her scream cut off in the middle. The Tunneler howled in response. Gyre pulled air into the bottom of her lungs and then howled back, lifting the rock above her head with both hands. She flung it down into the sump with all the extra power the suit gave her arms. The rock bounced off one of the Tunneler's scales.

"Gyre, stop!" Em tried to close the face plate, and Gyre punched the retract button again.

"It — Won't — Win! I won't let it!" Gyre spun. She found another rock and kicked it into the empty sump. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The rock scraped along one of the Tunneler's slit openings before tumbling down somewhere underneath it, and Gyre's blistered leg hurt so bad her vision flashed white. Her throat hurt, and that was what made her realize she was screaming again.

The horrible thing spun. It tried to eat stone the way Gyre had swum in water. Except there was no stone to eat to move up, and it fell down instead.

A great chasm opened where the sump had been. In her reconstructed vision it was a gaping black hole. The Tunneller writhed in the empty space, its scales flashing, and then it vanished into the depths of the cave.

Gyre sank down to her knees. Her leg protested again, and she choked on the pain. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to lean her weight on her injured leg, so she fell over sideways, trying to get off it.

YOU IDIOT.

Gyre started to laugh. Cave floor dust coated her lips when she breathed in.

PUT YOUR FACEPLATE BACK ON AND SHUT UP OR I'M NOT PAYING YOU.

"You have to pay me, it's in the contract," Gyre whispered. But she put the faceplate back on.

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

Gyre folded her arms up against her chest. She didn't have the time to lie here, but she needed it. She held herself, and rocked back and forth on the stone, and shook but did not laugh again.

YOU COULD HAVE DIED. PLEASE, GYRE. I COULD HAVE LOST YOU.

Gyre mouthed, "Sorry," without any noise to it.

Eventually Em made the legs of her suit stand up because Gyre couldn't move. She was crashing, hard. It felt like she'd been thrown down the Long Drop and left there to die. But that would be letting the cave win, wouldn't it?

Gyre let Em turn her around, and then she walked under her own power through Camp Three. She swiped one extra battery and no extra food — the cannula in her side hurt so bad, it made tears come to her eyes when she thought about it, and she was too nauseated besides — and began the ascent to the surface. It felt like her injured leg had been ripped open. Em did something to it, something that stung even through the pain of the split blister, and the ache receded just enough to climb through.

Gyre called the cave map up in her HUD. It couldn't reflect the damage from the Tunneler, it was a static image, but the climb gave her time to think. She had a good sense of what had happened and where the changes would have to be drawn.

Halfway through Cave Two, Gyre realized something.

"No one will ever be able to come back here," Gyre told Em. "It destroyed the floor in Camp Four. There's no way you can get to the Long Drop anymore. And that doesn't even matter."

"I know."

"It wrecked the sump from Camp Three. That hole was enormous. The rock must have been weak. It probably fell all the way down to the path leading up from the waterfall."

"I know." Em's voice was tense.

Gyre locked her hands into place and rested her forehead against stone. "No one can ever go down again, Em."

"You can't go down again," Em said.

"I know," Gyre said.

"No one can ever go down again, Gyre," Em said.

Gyre didn't say anything. She just stayed there, holding onto the rock. It was comfortable enough that she felt her eyes falling shut. She could have fallen asleep like that. The game was over. There were no moves left to make. From here was nearly a straight shot to the surface, and no one had ever encountered a Tunneler this close to fresh air before. If Gyre had wanted to, she could've fallen asleep and known she was safe.

Eventually Em said, "Please come back to me."

Gyre opened her eyes. "Base. On my way."


End file.
